Marco stepped fully into the kitchen, shrugging off his coat and taking in the atmosphere in a single sweep—the plated steaks, the tension thinned but not gone, Kidd standing a little straighter than necessary.
"Hope I didn't miss the main event," he said lightly.
"Perfect timing," Ithilien replied.
Kidd cleared his throat.
"Marco."
The doctor looked at him.
"I owe you an apology as well," Kidd said, direct as ever. "Yesterday escalated. I shouldn't have let it."
Marco studied him for a second, then shrugged as if it truly didn't weigh much.
"It's okay. I understand."
Kidd narrowed his eyes slightly. "That's it?"
"That's it."
A faint smirk touched the alpha's mouth. "For a human, you're weirdly composed. I've never seen anyone stand in front of an entire pack of wolves and not panic."
Marco reached for the wine bottle, unhurried.
"Not my first rodeo," he replied. "And I had a very dependable bodyguard with me."
His gaze flicked briefly toward his sister. Kidd followed it.
"Yeah," he said after a beat. "Not arguing about that."
Ithilien placed the final plate on the table and gave them both a pointed look.
"If you're done assessing species differences," she said coolly, "sit down before the steaks overcook out of spite."
Marco chuckled under his breath as he took his seat. Kidd did the same, but not before one last glance at Ithilien.
They had moved from food to strategy without ceremony. Plates were half-empty, wine poured but mostly untouched. Marco leaned back slightly, fingers laced together on the table. He had the air of someone presenting a case, not hosting dinner.
"As I said yesterday," he began evenly, "Fenrir wasn't a garage experiment. It originated from higher levels. Council oversight. Funding. Infrastructure. If it's active again, someone with access revived it."
Kidd listened without interrupting.
"We believe," Marco continued, "it would be wise to involve Dorian. The old Ranger has reach we don't. Old contacts. Institutional memory. If something survived under the surface, he's more likely to sense it."
Kidd nodded once. "I was planning to speak with him."
"I've already met him," Ithilien said quietly.
Both men glanced at her.
"In town. Carter was with him. They invited us for lunch tomorrow." She lowered her gaze back to her plate. "He said he has questions."
That was all.
She didn't elaborate. Didn't challenge. Didn't analyze.
Marco picked up the thread seamlessly, as if he had expected her contribution to be brief.
"I'm trying to identify who took blood from the boys," he said. "It was the same person. Same day. Back-to-back appointments."
Kidd's attention sharpened. "You're certain?"
"I verified the intake forms myself." Marco's tone remained clinical. "I've contacted the medical center. I'm waiting for confirmation of employment records."
Kidd leaned forward slightly. "You think it's that simple?"
"No," Marco replied without hesitation. "I don't. If someone is orchestrating this, they won't leave an obvious trail. But patterns exist. People make procedural mistakes. Even careful ones."
"And if the center refuses to cooperate?"
"Then I escalate. There are formal channels. And less formal ones."
Ithilien remained silent.
She had stopped eating. Her fork rested lightly between her fingers, unmoving. Her eyes were lowered—not in submission, not in discomfort. Just… elsewhere.
Kidd noticed but he tried to focus on Marco.
"You think the injections were targeted?" he asked.
"Yes, young wolves approaching first shift. That isn't coincidence. Someone is tracking developmental timelines."
"Which means someone is watching the pack."
"Yes."
Silence followed. Marco took a sip of wine.
"We don't yet know whether the objective is enhancement, destabilization, or long-term behavioral study. But it isn't random."
Ithilien sat at the table with her hands loosely wrapped around a mug that had long since gone cold. From the outside she looked composed, almost serene—the same calm presence she usually carried like a second skin. Her shoulders were relaxed, her posture straight, her expression neutral enough that a stranger might have assumed she was listening carefully to the conversation unfolding across the table.
But she wasn't.
Marco and Kidd were talking about Fenrir again. About the blood samples, about the possibility that whoever had injected the virus into the boys had done it during the same visit to the medical center. Marco's voice moved through the room in that steady, analytical tone of his, laying out possibilities, hypotheses, things that still needed confirmation.
Ithilien heard every word and none of it truly reached her.
Her mind drifted somewhere just beyond the edges of the kitchen, somewhere far from the quiet clink of cutlery and Marco's measured reasoning. The echo of the argument with Kidd still pulsed under her skin like a fading bruise. She could feel it in the tension along her spine, in the faint burn behind her ribs where anger and something far more complicated refused to settle.
She had let the mask slip.
Not completely—never completely—but enough.
Enough for him to see.
Her fingers tightened slightly around the mug before she realized it and forced them to loosen again. The porcelain clicked softly against the wood of the table.
Across from her, Marco continued speaking, gesturing lightly as he explained something about genetic sequencing and incomplete viral structures. Kidd listened, nodding once in a while, occasionally asking short, precise questions that kept the conversation moving forward.
To anyone watching, he looked perfectly controlled.
But every now and then his eyes shifted.
Just for a second.
A glance thrown in her direction before returning to Marco.
He expected a reaction. A comment. A sharp interruption, perhaps—the kind she had given him earlier in the kitchen.
He got nothing.
Ithilien didn't meet his gaze even once. Her eyes rested somewhere unfocused on the surface of the table, as if she were studying the grain of the wood with quiet interest. The faint scent of jasmine still clung to her, steady and unchanged, offering no hint of the storm that had passed through her only minutes earlier.
If anything, she seemed distant.
Detached.
The longer the silence stretched, the more it began to bother him.
Kidd forced himself to focus on Marco's words, but the awareness of her presence refused to fade. The memory of standing too close to her in the kitchen still lingered in his senses—her scent, the flash of anger in her eyes, the heat of her breath brushing his jaw.
And now she sat there as if none of it had happened.
As if she hadn't nearly set the room on fire with the things she'd said.
He glanced at her again, longer this time. Still nothing.
Ithilien's expression didn't change. Her breathing remained slow and even, her gaze lowered. The calm mask had returned, smooth and impenetrable, and if she noticed his attention at all, she gave no sign of it.
To Marco it probably looked like quiet exhaustion. To Kidd it looked like retreat and for some reason he disliked that far more than the argument.
So he turned back to the conversation, forcing his voice into the same controlled tone he had used before. But the emotions that had been stirred up in the kitchen had not disappeared.
Suddenly Marco's phone vibrated against the wooden table, the sound sharp in the otherwise steady rhythm of conversation. He glanced at the screen.
"Excuse me," he said, already standing. "That's the hospital."
He stepped away without waiting for a response, moving toward the hallway. A second later, the back door closed softly behind him.
Silence settled.
Kidd remained seated for a moment, watching Ithilien across the table. She hadn't moved. Her fingers still rested lightly near her untouched glass. Her expression was composed, neutral, almost distant.
"You do that on purpose?" he asked.